Converted Chapel 4 sale - Bristol

marcg

Vicstick, I know Hanham fairly well and agree it is a nice area - there is nothing wrong with the house in terms of location. I am questioning the price when the next most expensive house on the street sold for £330k and I can see from the aerial shots on Mouseprice that it was probably bigger than the chapel. Rightmove throws up a 5 bed house in Abbots Leigh for £475k - definitely bigger than this one. Ok, uniqueness has a premium but, other than the upstairs/downstairs swap this doesn't appear to be a characterful conversion, merely a nice house that used to be a chapel. So it's comparables are going to be normal 30s and 50s houses in the area.

Put it another way - would you pay 50% more for a house that used to be a chapel but doesn't have the exposed timbers/stained windows/feature stonework/original floors/crypt? As compared to a nice condition 30s house, that is.

GDB2222

There's a recent thread on this forum about buying the most expensive house on the street.

goRt

Aerial view - do you have permission to use that picture?
Don't show pictures with the snow - they might look good but everyone will know how long the property's been on sale for - keep your pictures fresh.

As stated by others - you can use rightmove and globrix websites at very low cost (and that's where people search)

Running_Horse

Half a million? I'd expect more than a patio for that, especially in the country (if there is a garden I failed to find it on your site). I suggest a really good agent would be worth their weight in gold. For every one buyer your site finds, they will have dozens on their books, and the skills to make them part with their money. Half a million? Really? Good luck with that.

Catblue

I'd also go with the estate agent idea, purely because although your house is lovely, you are probably looking at a niche market in terms of buyers.

Maybe have a look locally for some "niche" properties (converted mills, chapels etc.), see which are STC on rightmove and give the agents a call. There's no obligation to sign up with them of course, but they might just have the market expertise that you are missing.

I suspect that a lot of buyers who consider properties being sold privately think "Oh, the vendors are saving themselves £10K in EA fees, so I'll have to knock £10K off any offer I make". It can be a bit self-defeating, I reckon.

Fire_Fox

Just looked at the aerial view: your garden looks miniscule. Any chance you can approach the farmer with a view to increasing your garden a little? You don't actually have to buy the land, just get a price on the option for the new buyer.

Robin_hood_4

Wow, thanks again for all the advice (I didn't expect this much interest) .

Just to answer some of the re-occuring questions.

Why £500K ? This was the valuation obtained by taking the average of 3 estate agent valuations (2 were higher, but advised 499995 to put it under the stamp duty threshold.

I agree about the quality of the photo's. Some are old. There is work ongoing this week on the house to completely finish some of the detail (so there is a skip outside). When its gone, and we're all tiday, I'll take some better pics (and maybe lose the slide shows).

How will people find the web site ? I've advertised it on freeads, gumtree and several big corporate intranets in Bristol(Nokia, Orange etc). There's also a for sale sign outside the house (since this week). In addtion to this, we've printed flyers which have gone in local pubs, shops, doctors etc. When it is finished next week, we will also be advertising in the local press.

Floor plan - Work in progress. I want to ensure that measurements and plan are completely accurate before publishing (unfortunately, my job is quite time consuming, so its a weekend task)

The web site certainly isn't perfect, but is really intended to give more information in preapration for a viewing. Incidentally, just on the basis of the limited advertising to date, there has been a lot of interest, and we have 2 viewings this weekend.

Thanks again for all the comments. I'll certainly work on improving the site based on your feedback this weekend.

Fire_Fox

Do you know who your target market are? Are they locals or wanting to move out of London or Bristol? How do they search for properties? I can't imagine many people with half a million in the bank looking on Gumtree or the freeads.

PasturesNew

I have speed issues, so got bored waiting for it to load. I've also only bought 500MB of bandwidth, so wary of gobbling it up on something that's not essential.

If I can get my regular service working again, then I might poke my nose in and add opinions..... but it could be 2-3 days or a week.

Robin_hood_4

marcg wrote: »

Vicstick, I know Hanham fairly well and agree it is a nice area - there is nothing wrong with the house in terms of location. I am questioning the price when the next most expensive house on the street sold for £330k and I can see from the aerial shots on Mouseprice that it was probably bigger than the chapel. Rightmove throws up a 5 bed house in Abbots Leigh for £475k - definitely bigger than this one. Ok, uniqueness has a premium but, other than the upstairs/downstairs swap this doesn't appear to be a characterful conversion, merely a nice house that used to be a chapel. So it's comparables are going to be normal 30s and 50s houses in the area.

Put it another way - would you pay 50% more for a house that used to be a chapel but doesn't have the exposed timbers/stained windows/feature stonework/original floors/crypt? As compared to a nice condition 30s house, that is.

Just to answer this one, the house that sold for £330K is in fact semi detached, and a third of the propoerty that you can see on the airel view. It has about half of the floor space of our property, and needs serious modernisation (whereas has just been completely renovated). In view of this, I reckon the guide price is about right.

Thanks again for the comments.